Number of Syrian Refugees Tops 3 Million as Insecurity Grows

Number of Syrian Refugees Tops 3 Million as
Insecurity Grows – UN Agency

The parents and children of this
Syrian family sleep on the streets of Istanbul in Turkey.
They are among the 3 million refugees from Syria, many of
whom live in desperate conditions. Photo: UNHCR/S.
Baldwin

29 August 2014 – Three million Syrians will
have registered as refugees outside of their country today,
the UN refugee agency reported, amid accounts of
increasingly horrifying conditions inside their homeland –
cities where populations are surrounded, people are going
hungry and civilians are being targeted or indiscriminately
killed.

A news release issued by the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that a further 6.5 million
people are displaced within Syria, bringing to almost half
of all Syrians who have been forced to abandon their homes
and flee for their lives. One in every eight Syrians has
fled across the border, fully a million people more than a
year ago. Over half of those uprooted are children.

“The
Syrian crisis has become the biggest humanitarian emergency
of our era, yet the world is failing to meet the needs of
refugees and the countries hosting them,” said High
Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres.

And UNHCR
Special Envoy Angelina Jolie said: “Three million refugees is not
just another statistic. It is a searing indictment of our
collective failure to end the war in Syria.”

UNHCR
Spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told a press briefing in Geneva
today that increasing numbers of families are arriving in a
shocking state, exhausted, scared and with their savings
depleted. Most have been on the run for a year or more,
fleeing from village to village before taking the final
decision to leave their country.

The vast majority
remained in countries neighbouring Syria, with the highest
concentrations in Lebanon (1.14 million), Jordan (608,000)
and Turkey (815,000), according to UNHCR.

In addition to
the 3 million registered refugees, governments estimated
that hundreds of thousands more Syrians had sought sanctuary
in their countries with more than four in five refugees
struggling to make a living in towns and cities outside of
camps, with 38 per cent living in sub-standard shelter,
according to a recent survey.

Syrians are now the
world’s largest refugee population under UNHCR care,
second only in number to the decades-long Palestinian
crisis. The Syria operation is now the largest in the
agency’s 64-year history.

Jens Laerke, Spokesman for the
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA),
stated that more than 191,000 had lost their lives since the
beginning of the conflict in March 2011. Even that high
number was considered a conservative estimate with the real
death toll likely to be much higher, he said.

He said the
advance of Islamic State (IS) militants into central Syria
had taken violence against civilians to a whole new level as
the group continued to commit horrific atrocities against
those opposing its rule. There had also been an increase in
the use of barrel bombs by Government forces in Aleppo while
Islamist militants had cut off the water supply to an area
for displaced people, also in Aleppo, on several occasions.
That kind of collective punishment was clearly a breach of
some of the most basic principles in international
humanitarian law.

Overall, nearly 11 million people are in
need of aid in Syria and 4.7 million of them live in areas
that are hard to reach. There are still some 241,000 under
siege in various locations. Mr. Laerke informed that the UN
has now sent nine shipments to Syria from neighbouring
countries and more are planned over the following
month.

UNHCR said there are worrying signs that the
journey out of Syria is becoming tougher, with many people
forced to pay bribes at armed checkpoints proliferating
along the borders. Refugees crossing the desert into eastern
Jordan were being forced to pay smugglers hefty sums
(ranging from $100 per person or more) to take them to
safety.

Ms. Fleming said that UNHCR is also deeply
concerned for the well-being of several hundred Syrians
trapped inside a refugee camp in Al Qa’im, Iraq, after UN
agencies and international non-governmental organizations
were forced to abandon their offices and warehouses.

While
donors had contributed more than $4.1 billion to successive
regional response plans since 2012, more than $2 billion
more is needed by the end of 2014 alone to meet the urgent
needs of refugees.

“The response to the Syrian crisis
has been generous, but the bitter truth is that it falls far
short of what’s needed,” said Mr.
Guterres.

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